Michel de Certeau, or Historiography and Literature

This book offers a re-examination of Michel de Certeau's thought, demonstrating its fruitfulness for a sociolinguistics committed to taking plurality seriously. It argues that many contemporary approaches in the human sciences-particularly pragmatic or social-constructivist ones-paradoxically objectify the very plurality they claim to study. Conversely, Certeau's hermeneutic perspective establishes otherness, interpretation, and theoretical freedom as the very conditions for the production of knowledge. By contrasting Certeau's texts with François Dosse's interpretation of them, the book highlights a tension between the relatively conventional presentation of his epistemology of history and a more radical line of thought rooted in displacement, risk, and openness to the other. This analysis prompts an examination of the broader implications of his ideas for the human sciences-and specifically for a sociolinguistics that critically questions approaches based on corpora, fieldwork, and big data. Finally, the study underscores the affinities between Certeau's work and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.